Nosferatu: Director Robert Eggers on reviving the vampire film that ‘invented horror’ | Ents & Arts News

Robert Eggers has said that making his new film Nosferatu was a dream come true.

The writer and director at the helm of the project – starring Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard – seeks to revive the infamous vampire for a new audience.

“I’ve been kind of obsessed with Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror since I was nine years old,” he told Sky News, adding the film was “kind of a made-up horror movie.”

“There’s no way you’re not going to revisit some things, but hopefully in a more unexpected way.”

He added: “Even the girls that come from The Shining and that Freddy Kruger Shadow comes from Nosferatu.”

Derived from an attempt to avoid copyright infringement from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire made a brief appearance on screen in 1922 in Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror.

By changing the name from Dracula to Count Orlok, the mysterious figure and the story surrounding him clearly resembled the one created by the Irish writer – albeit with a few of the vampire’s characteristics changed.

In the FW Murnau film, Nosferatu’s bite site is different from that associated with Dracula. The film also, most notably, introduced the concept of vampires dying when exposed to daylight.

Stoker’s estate, managed by his widow Florence Balcombe, sued the silent film, and in July 1925 a court in Germany ordered that all copies of Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror be destroyed for copyright infringement.

Fortunately, some reminiscences survived and the film has served as a reference point and inspiration for a large number of thrillers and horror films since.

A fanatic of the genre, Eggers said the creature led him on the path to becoming a film director, and he wanted to combine both Count Orlok and Dracula’s traits to influence his version of the story.

“It took years to greenlight the film and it fell apart several times, but I’m happy because I got better as a filmmaker and storyteller and more fluid with my creative heads and actors,” he said. .

“I think the most notable difference between this and other versions of Nosferatu or even Dracula is that it centers on Ellen, the female lead played by Lily-Rose Depp – it’s her story.”

He added: “As far as the vampire goes, one thing that’s unique about this film is that it’s the first time you have a Dracula character that looks like a Transylvanian nobleman, who looks like a dead Transylvanian nobleman. It was like seen where the appearance came from, it is from folklore and from history”.

The 2025 film stars Depp as Ellen – the woman mentally trapped by Skarsgård’s Count Orlok. It also features appearances from Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe.

Not one to shy away from quirky characters, this is Dafoe’s second foray into a Nosferatu project. He played a version of the vampire in the 2000 film Shadow Of The Vampire and says he finds the genre fascinating.

“Film has the opportunity to talk about other worlds and other sensations and other thoughts. And I say bring it on,” the actor said.

“I like these elevated characters and these characters who are or have strong impulses and sometimes superficially have to have an extreme appearance. And yes, that’s what I’m going for”.

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Meanwhile, Skarsgard – who also played Pennywise the clown in 2017 horror IT – says it took him a while to distance himself from the creepy feeling he embodied as Nosferatu.

“It was a very trippy experience,” he said.

“Without trying to over-romanticize the silliness of what we do for a living, I felt like I needed to channel something that was outside of me. You know, like a line in the movie says, ‘Does darkness come from within or from the outside? ‘ And I think part of that came from your art as well.”

Nosferatu is in theaters now.